Despite widespread coverage of State Attorney Dan Eldad's decision to open a criminal investigation into the fifth dimension, the company Benny Gantz chaired as chairman of the board in 2018-2015, the public still finds it difficult to understand why an investigation is required and what alleged crimes were committed.

The need to investigate the fifth dimension was raised a year ago, with the release of the State Comptroller's report. The report and media reports indicate that the fifth dimension has scammed the Israeli police for NIS 4 million as well as valuable intellectual property in 2017. The auditor claims the company has acquired assets These are based on a 2017 contract that you sold through improper procedure (without a tender, competing offers or any testing of the competitor's products), and based on a misrepresentation of the company's capabilities and past achievements. The comptroller added that the fifth dimension was to generate an additional NIS 50 million from the alleged fraud, unless the Treasury officials raised questions about the police's refusal to check alternative suppliers.



The auditor's report notes that Gantz was personally involved in improper procedures that led to the contract, including attending an improper meeting with then-state commissioner Ronnie Elshich, but the report does not directly accuse Gantz of fraud.



As with any criminal case, a thorough investigation may change the picture. The auditor may have erred in concluding that the contract was the result of misrepresentation, but the investigation is more likely to corroborate the very fraud and reveal which of the fifth-dimensional people was involved in the criminal.

There is also a chance that the investigation will yield evidence of more serious crimes. From other publications you can learn about suspicious behavior of the fifth dimension.

Doron Cohen (formerly at Mossad) and Guy Caspi founded the company in 2014 and closed it in December 2018. It appears that in its four years of operation, the Fifth Dimension had only one customer: the Israeli police. Given that the company has never sought the approval required to negotiate with foreign buyers, its claims about advanced negotiations with foreign prospects appear to be false.

Curiously, Cohen and Caspi founded another company in 2014 called Deep Instinct, which apparently sold a similar product - artificial intelligence and data analysis (Big Data) that could predict security and business threats. Contrary to the fifth dimension, Deep Instinct still exists and seems to be a real business with real customers and real revenue.

It is doubtful whether the fifth dimension has ever reached a well-developed product. The auditor's report said that while the Fifth Dimension was still working on development, the Israel Police claimed that the product was ready. By contrast, Deep Instinct now seems to have a fully developed product.

This background raises a host of questions with criminal consequences. Was the Fifth Dimension established only for the purpose of obtaining the only contract with the Israeli police, thus putting a hand on confidential police data? Have intellectual property and Israeli police data been transferred to Deep Instinct? Has the Fifth Dimension negotiated with overseas buyers without regulatory oversight, and passed classified information? In accordance with the answers to these questions, the Fifth Dimension leaders may have committed more and more serious offenses than those in the Comptroller's report.

There was not necessarily criminal involvement of the Gantz - even if the fifth dimension involved criminal. The media reports indicate that Benny Gantz lacks the business and technological capability to understand or oversee the business of the Fifth Dimension, and that he was hired solely to give the company his well-known and esteemed name.

Gantz criticized the scheduling of the Fifth Dimension investigation as "political," and he is not wrong. Aviichi Mandelblit's refusal to order an investigation a year ago, despite repeated inquiries from Minister Gilad Arden, is puzzling. The impression that the criminal investigation was delayed for a year remained due to political motives.

Yair Lapid, Gantz's partner in Blue and White leadership, rejected the investigation more strongly, arguing that the alleged fifth-dimensional fraud was nothing but a bad business move, as opposed to supposedly "real crimes" between media and public figures. The Torch's presentation is exactly the opposite. A proper law enforcement system was vigorously investigating fraud cases of the kind suspected in the Fifth Dimension case, rather than seeking to punish media outlets for news coverage. It is to be hoped that the investigation of the Fifth Dimension affair will finally herald the desire of the prosecutor's office to enforce the existing criminal law, and not distort it in favor of political interests.

The writer is a professor of law faculties at Bar-Ilan University and San Diego University, and a senior fellow at the Ecclesiastical Forum